Julien Chieze, french journalist now full time youtuber, is pissed. He said in a video that Sony’s strategy and the consequences it has now on their output these last few years is catastrophic (same meaning in french).
He read the list of studios closures and cancellations of projects and it’s just insane. He also talked about Shuhei Yoshida who made some comments in an interview how he would have refrained from going all in in this live service endeavor but they didn’t listen.
It’s just crazy how they put all their eggs in the same basket without looking any further…
I think it’s good to aim for some variety. Like I’ve said in the past that Sony wouldn’t be wise to only work on big blockbuster single player games, or bet the farm on VR, or whatever else. Helldivers 2 was obviously a success for them. But it’s nuts how they seem to be lurching and overcorrecting this way and that, like one minute it’s ALL GAAS ALL THE TIME!!!, then the next it’s CANCEL ALL GAAS!!!.
It doesn’t seem that hard to just let studios focus on their strengths, branch out here and there but take it slow and steady, not keep running around chasing an industry trend and then do a complete 180 when things don’t look favorable.
Especially now that games take so many years to make. You keep running around changing directions on a dime and cancelling things that studios were already years deep into making, and you wind up in this situation where Sony Bend will basically skip the PS5 generation now.
Yeah, it was bound to fail. You can’t even have so many successful GAAS games at the same time on a platform. Stupid strategy from the start that has made a lot of damage to the brand.
Pivoting again will also be a long process. Years of development time lost for nothing and everything starting form scratch.
Any other platform would be doomed or very close to shutting down…
Part of the issue is they keep chasing trends recently, whereas in the past platform holders have been good at innovating or setting the direction, or at least making games not like much else around.
With AAA game dev taking so long, doing a Guardians of the Galaxy knock off that’ll arrive years later when the real thing is coming soon for free, or an Overwatch clone or live service versions of multiplayer modes you had in games so long ago everyone’s forgotten just seems really bad decision making / trend chasing
Not advocating for anyone losing their job, but there’s no way in hell Bend survives this. Bluepoint will likely stick around if they’re thrown back on remaster duty, but the morale will be destroyed.
I would not be surprised if some of the talent that was there just left because of the new strategy. It happens everywhere but this is not a good look at all for these studios.
The thing that sucks about Sony cancelling so many of their games is that you know they plan to money hat the shit out of a bunch of stuff to fill in their line up smfh